The American Spectator

The Washington Post had this howler yesterday as the lead item in its Outlook section, profiling some poor soul in suburban Maryland who has not fared well under the global warming industry’s PR assault (rather, he responded precisely as the folks underwriting it hoped). The end is nigh, stock up on your weapons and prepare for the looting that is sure to precede the Armageddon which itself is even more certain. We didn’t listen! as parodied by South Park, etc.

In the past, such hysterics were not celebrated, to put things mildly. And add to the the Left’s list of hypocrisies that they have dined out for decades sneering at survivalists and anyone who prepared for a consequence — say nuclear exchange — the relative likelihood of which was spectacularly greater than their computer modeled climate catastrophe which observations have left behind in their dust of alarmism as time passes and the global warming movement’s cynical ‘no time to talk! anyway, debate over! Must. Act. Now!’ scheme failed.

Here’s the rub, though. The guy’s proof is a) strange weather, and b) “Why would private insurance companies lie about climate change? Already, Allstate has stopped selling new homeowners’ policies in coastal Virginia and Maryland because the warming Atlantic Ocean is bringing larger hurricanes to the region. And Munich Re, one of the largest insurance companies in the world and a leader in drawing attention to the role of carbon emmissions [sic] in driving global warming, announced in January that weather-related disasters soared in 2010, providing ‘further indications of advancing climate change.’”

Christopher Booker coincidentally answers that today here. Also, in short, reinsurers need expectations of future disaster to keep up demand and therefore prices. There have not been enough disasters in recent years to achieve this without further hype (hype to the contrary notwithstanding). See Roger Pielke, Jr. here for some insight.

The insurance industry is rent-seeking like all the rest who are pushing this agenda, talking their own book, in essence, not much differently than is DeutscheBank and GE.